Instead of providing objective information, citizens were forced to choose between narratives supporting the government and the opposition that played on their emotions.
The presidential election is finally done after months of tremendous drama that enthralled spectators even outside of Turkey. In spite of the majority of surveys and analysis favoring his longtime challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu in the run-up to the election, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won.
Much has been written about how Erdogan was able to win a third term in history despite skyrocketing prices and a disastrous reaction to the earthquake in February. The failure of Kilicdaroglu to grab what many thoughts was the opposition’s best opportunity to unseat Turkey’s longest-serving leader has also received a lot of attention.
Less media attention has been paid to how Turkish media performed during the contentious election season, and when it has, it has tended to concentrate on Erdogan’s tight control of the media. However, the overwhelming media bias was well anticipated, and the opposition bloc had the time and opportunity to create a setting where critical or independent outlets could provide an alternative. It seems to have preferred not to.
In a video he posted on Twitter two days prior to the run-off election on May 28, Kilicdaroglu appeared enraged.
He claimed that telecommunications providers were preventing him from sending text messages even to journalists on orders from the government, claiming that he was experiencing a “total blackout.”
“Continual slander, lies, and conspiracies… Should I not vote in this election?”
In contrast, the incumbent president gave a live interview the day before the first round of voting that was simultaneously broadcast on more than two dozen channels.
Kilicdaroglu lamented the lack of fairness as the vote count came to a close and Erdogan had a four-point lead: “We experienced the most unfair election in recent years. For a political party, the entire state apparatus was mobilized.
One man had every option at his disposal”.
Biased Reporting
His way of thinking wasn’t unique. International observers also observed that due to biased media coverage in favor of the government during the campaign, neither the first round on May 14 nor the run-off two weeks later were fair.
Consider the public television network TRT. It gave Erdogan’s campaign more than 48 hours of live airtime, whereas Kilicdaroglu had only 32 minutes to spread his message between 1 April and 11 May, despite being funded by taxpayers and required by the constitution to be impartial.
Sinan Ogan, the third presidential candidate, didn’t even exist before the first round vote, so much so that he held a media briefing in protest outside TRT headquarters for those who get their news from TRT. Solely after advocating Erdogan in front of the run-off was he hailed as a kingmaker, and the locked entryways of the channel were mysteriously opened for him.
The ruling AKP’s dominance over mainstream media has resulted in a dramatic decline in journalistic competence and quality over time. During the political race season, this miserable situation was reflected in a few dramatic live transmission episodes.
One of them happened on A Haber, a private news channel owned by the Turkuvaz Media Group, a group that supports the government. As voters left the voting booth, a crew at Istanbul Airport questioned them, to which one of them responded in Arabic: I’ve never witnessed elections as democratic as those in Turkey.
Albeit the reporter immediately hindered him, the second circulated around the web via virtual entertainment, starting analysis of the identification conspire that awards Turkish citizenship through land buys.
Days after the fact, another significant bungle occurred when Erdogan was live on TRT with one of his number one feature writers, Abdulkadir Selvi, who requested that the president make sense of his new comments in crusade rallies about a video purportedly showing the banned Kurdistan Laborers’ Party’s chiefs singing on the side of Kilicdaroglu.
Erdogan responded, acknowledging that the video he repeatedly played to his supporters was altered by saying, “Kilicdaroglu has videos with those in Qandil… Be it montage, this or that, these videos were recorded.”
